Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Wed 05/28/2025 View Tue 05/27/2025 View Mon 05/26/2025 View Sun 05/25/2025 View Sat 05/24/2025 View Fri 05/23/2025 View Thu 05/22/2025
2008-06-06 -Short Attention Span Theater-
The Audacity of Hype
James Taranto, "Best of the Web" @ Wall Street Journal

Congratulations to Barack Obama for clinching the nomination, making history, etc. Sorry to be so grudging about it, but we just can't work up any enthusiasm--not when we see how ridiculous people look when they do work up enthusiasm. This is from a dispatch by Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press:

To understand how Barack Obama won the presidential primary, you have to look at what he learned when he lost.

Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton solidly in the Iowa caucuses in January, but five days later she beat him, painfully and unexpectedly, in New Hampshire. That loss showed him that toppling the royal family of Democratic politics would not come easily.

"I think this was meant to be," Obama said privately the next day, recalls adviser David Axelrod. "I think we were flying too close to the sun, like Icarus. When you're fighting for change, it's not supposed to be easy."

In Greek mythology, Icarus' father gives him wax wings that empower him to fly, but warns of the danger in soaring too high. Obama got similar warnings. When he arrived in Washington, Senate dean Robert Byrd cautioned him not to be in too much of a rush to leave for the White House.

But like Icarus, Obama wouldn't heed his elder's advice. Icarus would crash into the sea. Obama would learn from his own crash in New Hampshire and make history.

Uh-oh, are we going to start hearing about how Obama would be the "first Greek president"? Agence France-Presse has more hard-hitting reporting:

George Lucas has created legendary film heroes like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, but the US director says that in real life, his hero is Barack Obama.

Lucas was in Japan on Wednesday to promote his latest film, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," as Obama clinched the Democratic Party's nomination for president.

"We have a hero in the making back in the United States today because we have a new candidate for president of the United States, Barack Obama," Lucas said when asked who his childhood heroes were.

Obama, "for all of us that have dreams and hope, is a hero," Lucas said.

The headline--we're not making this up--reads, "The Force Is With Obama, 'Star Wars' Creator Says." We liked Lucas better when he was working on missile defense.

And Politico quotes Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat:

"I cried all night. I'm going to be crying for the next four years," he said. "What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation's political history. . . . The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance."

Reporting on the international reaction to Obama, however, the AP's Jill Lawless quotes someone who seems to damn Obama with faint praise:

The excitement was less about Obama's foreign policy--which remains vague--than a sense that his victory marks a historic moment.

Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said Obama's win "has sent out a lot of positive signals around the world."

"He has a very appealing persona--elegant, fluent, strings lots of sentences together into paragraphs," Cox said. "But in terms of (his) actual policies towards the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, China, Europe--actually, we don't know."

Of course, taking sentences and stringing them together in paragraphs is nothing to sneeze at. That's how the existing books of the Bible got written.
Posted by Mike 2008-06-06 06:47|| || Front Page|| [11133 views ]  Top

#1 I'm curious what, exactly, they think this guy is going to do when he gets into the white house. They don't have any idea, they havent asked him what he will do, they havent even got wishlist, but they know he's their man. Nobody could live up to the expectations that this rube is building for himself.
Posted by bigjim-ky 2008-06-06 09:20||   2008-06-06 09:20|| Front Page Top

#2 Are they seriously trying to say that the guy who thought we had 57 states would know the tale of icarus?
Posted by flash91 2008-06-06 13:11||   2008-06-06 13:11|| Front Page Top

14:34 Frank G
14:28 Melancholic
14:27 NoMoreBS
14:14 swksvolFF
14:12 swksvolFF
13:54 mossomo
13:51 mossomo
13:50 NoMoreBS
13:50 Abu Uluque
13:44 Abu Uluque
13:41 NoMoreBS
13:39 Abu Uluque
13:36 mossomo
13:36 swksvolFF
13:32 mossomo
13:26 Frank G
13:12 Regular joe
13:12 mossomo
13:11 swksvolFF
13:08 Abu Uluque
13:00 swksvolFF
12:59 Regular joe
12:55 Skidmark
12:53 Skidmark









Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com